What I Used to Know About Being a Girl

I didn’t used to use makeup. At all. I was raised by parents who would tell both my sister and I that we didn’t need it and we were pretty enough. I even specifically remember my father telling us that we didn’t need to “make up” for anything so why bother with makeup? And for very many years, I took that to heart… zealously. I had even, as recently as a couple of years ago, judged other girls in the past for wearing “too much makeup” or wearing it at all, or assumed that if you took off a pretty girl’s makeup that she’d be pretty plain or even ugly.

A “pffft, she wouldn’t be so hot if she wasn’t covering her face in paint” sort of attitude.

Tack that on with a mother who raised two tom boys and, well, you kind of get the picture.

Not that there was anything WRONG with being a tomboy. For the last 20-some years I hated wearing skirts, never did my hair, was never curious about makeup, loved sports and hated pink. But I was pretty happy being a tomboy because it meant I wasn’t like “all those other girls,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean to an angsty 14-year-old know-it-all smartass. I do know what my mother was trying to do: she was trying to raise strong, independent women who were not obsessed about what they looked like but rather what they DID with themselves. She was on a mission to make us powerful, outspoken, and bold… and I’d say she succeeded rather well.

But now I’m in my late twenties and while I can’t speak for my sister, I feel a bit… disconnected. Gender roles seem to rest well with everyone around me but myself, where comments and claims as to what a dude “should” like versus what a girl “should” like really rubbed me the wrong way. Not the vapid stuff like, “oh those MEN, talking about SPORTS and eating MEAT and wearing PANTS” and “oh those GIRLS, gossiping about their FRIENDS and doing their NAILS and fixing their HAIR” blah blah blah. But more that I don’t know how to connect to other girls because I really don’t get what it means to be girly or fashionable or pretty…and that I feel like I make a fool out of myself when I try.

Even so, I like hanging out with guys more than with girls because I feel like I have more to say to guys. It’s easier, they’re easier. But maybe that’s because I’ve always been terrified of actually BEING a girl, of betraying my strong-willed mother and doting father… of putting makeup on this face that is a combination of who they are. Of hiding it, masking it, believing that it’s not pretty “enough” and that I have to do things to it to make it pretty “enough”… whatever the hell THAT means.

Then I wonder: maybe makeup isn’t hiding or making up for anything. Maybe it’s just what you use to feel good about yourself, to love yourself… to show off what is so great about who you are. It’s to highlight the features of your face that you like and downplay the ones that you don’t… not because you think you look BAD, but because, in fact, looking good makes you feel good. Not because you hate yourself, but because you in fact you love yourself.

Is it vain? Does it overemphasize our looks and not who we are? Yeah, probably. But when so much of what we hate about ourselves is how we look… I gotta ask: is it really so bad to give a shit how you look? If you love how you look, isn’t that meant to be a good thing? No one’s saying that looks are everything, but I think we’re all saying that looks still matter, particularly when we look in the mirror.

And it’s not even because I want to be a girl; makeup can be for dudes as much as ladies (YEAH I SAID IT), marketing and societal pressures be damned… A GIANT HAMMER ISN’T GOING TO FALL OUT OF THE SKY AND KNOCK A DUDE IN THE HEAD IF HE DECIDES HE WANTS TO WEAR FOUNDATION. But no, I think some of it’s about wanting to know what it’s like. To try it, get into it a bit, see how it feels… see what all these girls are raving about rather than judge them as I have in the past. Some of it might also be me wanting my boyfriend to just stop in his tracks when he sees me and go “wow” because he can’t think of anything else to say.

So here I am, in my late twenties, using the internet and an uncanny talent for research to learn about something any 14-year-old girl would know more about than I do: being a girly girl and being okay with that.